American squad built for speed

LAS VEGAS — The United States Olympic team spent Monday’s practice session working against a 2-3 zone defense and full-court press, the select team of young stars scrambling hard to disrupt the running game that figures to produce prodigious scores in London for Team USA.

“Personally, I like to play man-to-man against anybody, but I guess if I was on some of those teams they’re going to play over there, I’d probably want to play zone against them, too,” said Spurs forward and select team member Kawhi Leonard. “They’re pretty tough to stop when they get out on the break.”

In fact, Team USA literally was built for speed, especially after it lost three of its best big men to injury. It was always going to run at every opportunity, but when post men Dwight Howard, LaMarcus Aldridge and Chris Bosh had to drop off the roster, their replacements were athletic bigs, rather than post-up players.

“You deal with the players you have and cards you have,” said Team USA managing director Jerry Colangelo, tasked with putting together the U.S. men’s team since 2005. “If you have a roster with a lot of bigs, you complement those bigs with certain kinds of players. We don’t have a lot of bigs in this country, on any level. That’s the reality of it.

“What you find is that the bigs we do have that are 6-9, 6-10 — they’re athletes. So we play to our strength this way by putting together a roster of great athletes who are versatile and can play different positions. Then you add specialists who can give a coaching staff all kinds of options.”

Option No. 1: Run, run, run.

To that end, the replacements for 2008 Olympians Howard and Bosh, and Aldridge, were athletic center Tyson Chandler and versatile power forwards Blake Griffin and Kevin Love.

The other players who joined the five holdovers from Beijing all excel in the open court: Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, James Harden and Andre Iguodala.

Teams that try to slow the pace or pressure the ball should beware, according to Colangelo.

“We shouldn’t give anyone a chance to slow anything down,” he said, “because if we want to put pressure on the ball, I can’t think of a guy in the world who can put pressure on the ball better than Russell Westbrook.”

LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, both officially listed at 6-8, have been told they will get some time at the center position on small lineups that will pose matchup problems for any opponent.

“We have to defensive rebound in order to get out and run, and we look forward to it,” said James, who averaged 7.9 rebounds for the NBA champion Heat this past season. “Rebounding is important to anything that you do. We’ve got guys who rebound, who average double-digit rebounds and high single-digits. We’ve got plenty of guys who can rebound.”

The 2008 “Redeem Team” — American gold-medalists after Argentina’s 2004 triumph — averaged 106.2 points in eight 40-minute games. Since NBA players have been allowed in the Olympics, only the 1992 Dream Team scored more, averaging 116.0 points while enjoying a margin of victory of 43.2 points per game.

Colangelo believes firmly that this team is capable of scoring more frequently. He has declared it deeper and better than the 2008 team and reiterated the reasons Monday.

“I’ve been outspoken on this, but I’ll stick to it: I liked our 2008 team, but it was a young team with one gold-medalist, Jason Kidd. The core of our team was a bunch of 22-year-old and 23-year-old guys. Those guys are here today, only they’re at the peak of their careers right now: Deron (Williams), LeBron, Chris (Paul) and Carmelo.

“Then you bring the young kids who are here, and it is a blending of eras, and this squad will be more athletic and deeper than we had in 2008. So I like this team a lot, and I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking that we don’t have this or we don’t have that. I know what we do have, and people have to worry about what we have.”